With Grace Winter, heroine of The Lifeboat, now on board the author interview section of annethology, I'm wondering how to introduce her to the two characters already there: Satish and Futh.  She's certainly got food issues in common with both of them but, having survived for a couple of weeks on raw fish and hardtack, I imagine that's not something she'd be keen to discuss.  The power of memory, and questions of its validity, is an issue explored in all three novels, but, fascinating as it is, I've blogged about memory already, so I've decided to celebrate my third author interview with a quick look at some of the ways these writers have made things harder for their heroes and heroines.  This is especially useful for me, as it's something I find quite difficult: I've no problem with bleak, I just don't like making it bleaker.    So let's have a look at how Alison Moore, Shelley Harris and Charlotte Rogan have gone about it.

1.   Send them on a journey.
This can be a journey through geographical space, such as Grace's trip across the Atlantic, or a metaphorical journey back to the past, as Satish faces with the Jubilee party reunion.  Or it can be both, as for Futh, with a walking tour that recreates an earlier holiday with his father.  Not only is your character stepping out into unfamiliar territory without their familiar props, but there's so much potential for things to go wrong.  While most luxury ocean liners don't have to be abandoned, lots of us have had the experience of getting lost and arriving at our destination much later than we'd hoped, or being mentally dragged back to a place in our lives we'd rather leave behind.

2.  Foist other people on them.
We all know that every protagonist needs an antagonist, someone to thwart their story goals.  But they don't need to be much of a villain to make life difficult, they can just be other people being themselves.  When Satish's childhood friend pushes him to attend the Jubilee reunion, she can't possibly understand the trauma she's rekindling.  Okay, the proprietor of the guesthouse where Futh begins and ends his circular walk isn't a bundle of laughs, but he isn't to know that Futh doesn't understand how other people's minds work and has no idea of the suspicion his behaviour, in all innocence, is arousing.  Grace, on the other hand, perhaps stemming from a lifetime of economic dependence in the days before women had the vote, never in my opinion completely loses control, despite relying for her very survival first on her new husband, then on the shifting power dynamics within the lifeboat, and finally on the opinion of the jury about the part she played in the murder of Mr Hardie.  The much quoted truism that we can't live with other people and can't live without them either applies as much to novels as to real life.

3.  Get down to basics.
You know about Maslow's hierarchy, and our basic human need to address our fundamental physiological concerns before we can move on to higher-order issues.  I've already mentioned how getting enough, or the right, food had me worried across all three novels, especially The Lifeboat where Grace was at genuine risk of starvation.  This was also one of those rare novels where the characters get to go to the toilet – or not, as it happens, given that lifeboats aren't provided with such luxuries, so the poor women had to fiddle about with a bailer under their ankle-length skirts. 
Not exactly life-threatening, but I do know from experience it's extremely painful, so I did sympathise with Futh and his blisters, while cursing him for buying new walking boots before setting out on a long-distance walk, and I'm not sure that I could have done that to him.

Still, the Beatles got it wrong about Jude: it's not the author's job to make it better, we've got to take a sad situation and make it worse.  Or at least until the very end of the story.

Please share your views on this or any other aspects of the author interviews.  The next one, with Gavin Weston, author of Harmattan, should be launched fairly soon, with a post about the end of childhood following on not long after.

As for my own writing, June is shaping up to be my personal short story month, with several publications promised: one I've been waiting for for about a year (the contract's signed but I'm not holding my breath) while another two were only accepted this week.  I'll keep you informed.

I was moaning recently how I wasn't content to be a writer, I wanted to be a published novelist.  I still do, of course, but on the days that that seems an impossible dream, this amusing short story from David Howard is beautifully reassuring.  Who wants their novels to go on sale for less than the price of a bookmark?

Do take a look at my author interviews for debut novels that have done rather better and, to mark the latest interview with Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat, my next post is on three ways to make life harder for your protagonist.

I'm watching the evening news and somebody's been killed in a car crash. Let that be a lesson to us all to drive more carefully, I think. A life cut short: a tragedy for his family and friends.

Then they bring on a representative of said family and friends to spell it
out for me, to mumble through the cliches of loss just in case I haven't got the message. Hey, I want to tell the programme editor, I'm a grown up. I've been to that place where you can't understand how the world keeps turning without that person in it but, even if I hadn't, I think I'd understand that if you lose a loved one you feel sad. My heart hardens for every talking head that tells me how wonderful the deceased was. I think of all the senseless deaths from war and poverty and corruption that don't make it onto my TV.

Don't try to dictate what I should feel!

I get a similar reaction reading some fiction, where the required emotion seems to be shouting at me in capital letters, bold type and underlined  three times. I don't think I'm lacking in compassion – in fact, I'm quite easily moved to tears – but it's been known for an overdone death scene in more than one bestselling novel to have me in fits of laughter.

A good novel should take us on an emotional journey but, frankly, if the writer lacks the wherewithal to carry the reader with her, perhaps she shouldn't leave the house at all. Or perhaps a leisurely stroll to the coffee shop is the right journey for some if a round-the-world tour entails lost
luggage and a night in a prison cell. A lot of people can appreciate a really good cup of coffee: it doesn't have to be the big drama every time.

What do I think does make for an emotionally satisfying read?

… or from the perspective of a baffled child who inevitably won't have access to the whole picture, but the adult reader will feel the full poignancy of the impact of the tragedy on both him and his parents.

And always always understatement: trusting the reader to know enough about the workings of the world to understand that there's something seriously wrong when it doesn't occur to a child to tell her father that her boots are pinching her toes and she needs new ones. (I know, not the main scene of the novel, but nevertheless a beautiful depiction of child neglect.)

Or keeping us hoping for a favourable outcome against the odds – whoever heard of a hostage situation where they all lived happily ever after? – as if the reader were living it with them day by day. I've read this a couple of times and I still don't know how she does it, but I feel like King Canute trying to hold back the  tide.

Again on endings, how about the shock emotional punch? We knew from the start that Kevin had killed several of his schoolmates, but I was in tears when I discovered that that was only the half of what he'd done. Then another thing that makes this book so powerful is the complexity of Eva's  reaction. She's as far removed from the grieving relatives on my TV news as you can get. Having struggled to love her son since before he was born, we might expect her to be glad of an excuse to give up on him, but it seems that it's only once the world confirms that he's evil that their relationship can really begin.

Much as we might wish, in real life as in novels, bad things
only happened to bad people, we're less likely to feel manipulated as a reader if we find a less sympathetic character tugging at our heartstrings. So Eva
Khatchadourian, so David Lurie: they feel like real people, rather than symbols for a particular emotion, stumbling through life in a not particularly admirable way. They're
also caught up in something much bigger than themselves, so that what we feel is not just for them as individuals, but for the whole situation, in Lurie's case the pain of a country picking up the pieces after the damage wrought by apartheid.

Of course, this is nothing like the whole story. There's much more could be said about each of these novels as well as about the markers of emotional depth. And not just a little anxiety in setting such a high standard in relation to my own work. (I can only fail, and each time fail better.) But an important theme, I think, and one to keep coming back to.
What do you think?

Carlie commented recently that I should be more assertive about my ambition as a writer.  But I have always been rather coy about identifying myself that way.  It's the fear of being judged not worthy of so illustrious a title crossed with the shame of being caught out engaged in something so untoward. Despite it being such an enormous part of my identity since childhood I, along with many others, kept my writing self hidden in the closet for many years:

But at least he's someone the public would recognise as a legitimate writer, earning money and acclaim.  If he struggles, what hope for the rest of us with so much less to show for our efforts?

I've actually grown more confident since starting this blog, though I doubt it's ever going to entertain 20,000 strangers.  But what I've learnt is that I don't have to wait for someone to allow me to be a writer; I am one, and here's why. 

I know there's a view that a writer is anyone who writes, but I don't think life's supposed to be that easy.  But when you make the move from writing as splurging the contents of your mind onto screen or paper to getting out that red pen or its virtual equivalent, that's when you become a real writer.

A writer knows the rules of writing
... although may not necessarily follow them!
As writers, we can write how the hell we like, but I think it behoves us to have a reasonable acquaintance of the basics of spelling and grammar, as well as the fundamentals of writing technique, such as showing versus telling; pacing and tension; writing credible characters – and making sure your sentences don't run away with themselves.  The kind of thing that's covered ad nauseam in books, blogs and courses, which might be just as well, because you can never get enough.  While I say a writer knows, it's a kind of knowing that shrinks as it grows because, the more you go into it, the more you discover there is to learn.  Although I guess it's like that with most complex matters.

A writer has served their time

It takes time to learn to edit, time to find your voice, time to work out how to make the rules work for you, so I don't think anyone is justified in waking up one morning and saying, I'm a writer, without putting in the work.  They've got to serve an apprenticeship first, albeit one that's not very clearly defined.  How much time do they have to sit chained to their desk before I'll grant them the title?  How much help or training will they get along the way?  Nothing is guaranteed apart from, perhaps, the disappointments, the early expectations proven to be naïve, like the young apprentice sent to the storeroom to fetch a long stand.

A writer has readers

Although it's much easier with the help of other people, a writer can learn her craft ensconced in the seclusion of her garret, divorced from the rest of the world.  But to overcome my final hurdle, her writing has to find an audience one way or another.
In the same way that the word mother carries with it the implication of a child, a leader implies followers and a teacher students, a writer needs readers before they're properly invested with the role.  It needn't be the 20,000 strangers Mark Haddon mentioned – I've genuinely no idea but with so much competition for people's attention on the internet I'd be delighted if I had twenty people reading my short stories – but it needs to be more than friends and family and her cosy creative writing group.  Publication might be less about kudos or a hallmark of quality (that's a whole different ballgame) but the process for the writer of letting go of her creation and allowing readers to make of it what they will (which isn't always what you expect).

Is that it?
I've been brewing this post for quite a while and am conscious that there's stuff I haven't touched on and, on a different day, I might have come up with something quite different.  I'm quite satisfied with how this defines me as a writer – except that what I really want to be is a novelist.
What do you think?

Apropos of the previous post, and writers of historical fiction, did you see that Emma Darwin has launched a blogging competition to mark her 500th postiversary?  Perhaps that should be the cue for my overly foreshadowed post on why I'm blogging but, revisiting my draft, it seems overly earnest for someone on only her 31st post.   (Gosh, my blog count is rapidly catching up with my short story publications.  Not sure how I feel about that.)    But in the spirit of celebrating prime numbers, and so as not to lose it altogether, as well as to stop me harping on about it, I thought I'd give you the abbreviated version today.

So I'm blogging because:

I'd like to have a go at Emma's competition, as much in recognition of her wonderful support to novice writers, than with my eye on the prize.  Although I don't have anything like the same ambition for my blog than for my fiction (the first is play, the second work), the discipline would probably do me good.  If I could focus on 2, without letting 1 take over, I might get more of 3 and 4, although I don't think it would ever match what 5 meant to me.  (See here, for examples of Emma's exemplary posts.)

What about you?

My next post will be on definitions of a writer (in response to Carlie's prompt), unless anything else takes my fancy before then. 

I do love the way fiction can take me to unexpected places, not just as a reader, but as a writer, too.  A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find inspiration for a short story in Margaret Thatcher's funeral.  Now I'm hanging out with mediaeval nuns.  I'm greatly enjoying the company, but I feel a terrible fraud, seeing as I'm totally unqualified as a historian.  I think I've got an O level in history, but that would've been on the industrial revolution and, even as someone who believes my computer works by magic, it's hard to imagine the lives of people in a pre-mechanistic age.    Except, I remind myself, in some parts of the world life is still like that, and I have had the privilege of passing through some such communities and catching a glimpse of what it's like to live without running water or electricity.  So maybe I've got more to draw on than I thought.
Nevertheless, not having previously delved into history any further back than my parents' childhoods, it is quite a different experience for me having to constantly check my facts (and, if it weren't for the internet, it would be far too arduous a task for one short story).    For example, I knew not to have my nuns growing potatoes (although spuds were on my mind having just, belatedly, planted mine in the garden), but what other vegetables that we now take for granted would not be available in the Middle Ages?
Fact checking was fairly straightforward, however, but what about the language?  My dictionary does give a rough date for when various words were introduced, but how authentic did I have to be?    How authentic was I capable of being, without immersing myself in contemporaneous documents for a couple of months?
Where I stumbled most was with verbs as metaphor, or muscular verbs.    I balked at using the word drive to indicate motivation or compulsion, because of its automatic association with motor transport for modern readers, even though I'm sure the word would have served equally well in the Middle Ages for driving cattle.
I don't think this issue is unique to historical fiction, more an extreme case of something we need to think about in all our writing.  Have we got the facts right, or near enough that they won't derail the story, and is the language consistent with the character and setting?    Or perhaps I'm just trying to cover myself for straying into territory where I have no right to be?
Interesting also how the blog leads me to the unexpected, not just the fun stuff I find on other people's, but what I choose to post.  In other words, I hadn't expected to do this one, but the other two I mentioned last time (on identity as a writer and on blogging) need a little more polishing and there's bank holiday sunshine promised here in England, so I'll give them a bit more time to ripen.
Meanwhile, whether or not you have delved into historical fiction, as a reader or a writer, please share your views.